How to Keep Your Consumers Happy in an ‘Amazon World’

Produced by Michael Bryan, Vice President, Digital & Data Strategy

It was once true that an “interpersonal touch” was enough to meet consumers’ desires for a positive, personalized sales or service experience. While that experience is still very important, today’s consumer is used to interacting with companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix, who consistently deliver hyper-personalized, hyper-valuable recommendations and offers to every one of their patrons – These are the service standards of today’s consumer.

There is a growing expectation among consumers that all interactions be tailored to their personal sales and service preferences. This is especially the case among younger demographics like Millennials and Gen Z, however older demographics like Baby Boomers have also grown accustomed to this personalized approach.

To remain competitive and continue growing your business, you’ll need to strive for this same ‘Amazon-level’ service experience across all channels and touchpoints. And to do so successfully, you must build a digital strategy that addresses the wants and needs of the community and consumers you serve.

The first question your business needs to ask when seeking to adopt a successful digital strategy – nay, business strategy of any kind – should always be: ‘What does the data tell us?’

Looking at live consumer data (i.e. product history, transaction data, and recorded service interactions) will help your business to recognize trends in activity, so you can form a clearer picture of the unique needs of the consumers you serve – from the individual level to the community level. These keen data insights can provide the ‘who, what, where, when, and how’ of consumer behavior, which can then be used to generate personalized service interactions and relevant product offers.

So what data should you use and where can you find it?

Well, that depends on where your business is at in the ‘digital transformation’ process. In other words, what data you pull and where you pull it from will depend on the resources you currently have at your disposal to compile and analyze data.

There is plenty of data you can use to begin transforming and personalizing service interactions right away – even if your financial institution is in the early stages of this process.

Take the following example:

Rather than sending a HELOC offer to all of the consumers on your mailing list, you choose instead to leverage accessible data to deliver this to a more relevant subset of your consumers. Depending on the level of data you have, this could take one of many forms, such as the following:

Sending an email with HELOC information sent only to accountholders that you know to be homeowners.

Taking this a level deeper: Offering HELOCs only to your home-owning accountholder who have good credit history, but low checking account balances and/or high credit card balances.

Taking this even one level deeper: Sending this offer only to those less risky homeowners who have performed a recent search on your website for HELOCs or related loan options.

The point is this:

Leveraging data to build a consumer-driven digital strategy is totally achievable, regardless of your budget. It just takes an intentional investment of time and resources, and the acknowledgement that your data is your greatest asset.

The key is getting started right away so you don’t risk losing business to competitors that are leveraging data to provide this hyper-personalized experience today’s consumers have come to know and love.

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Content in the blog posts are the opinion and views of the writer, and don't necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Allied Solutions.